The humble bumblebee might help disrupt the multi-billion dollar synthetic pesticide industry. A new system uses bees to help deliver natural pesticides and beneficial fungi directly to plants—and because bees are so much more precise than the typical sprayers on farms, they can use a tiny fraction of the pesticide and make plants stronger.
"Imagine you have an apple orchard," says Michael Collinson, president and CEO of Bee Vectoring Technology, the Vancouver-based startup behind the technology. "Because apple trees have a very large canopy, even though you may spray it and use a special type of spray that doesn't go everywhere, you still won't touch every bloom. Whereas the bees deliver product every single day, to every single bloom."